Inferring Social Influence of anti-Tobacco mass media campaigns

Abstract

Anti-tobacco mass media campaigns are designed to influence tobacco users. It has been proved campaigns will produce their changes in awareness, knowledge, and attitudes, and also produce meaningful behavior change of audience. Anti-smoking television advertising is the most important part in the campaign. Meanwhile nowadays successful online social networks are creating new media environment, however little is known about the relation between social conversations and anti-tobacco campaigns. This paper aims to infer social influence of these campaigns, and the problem is formally referred to as the “Social Influence inference of anti-Tobacco mass mEdia campaigns” (SITE) problem. To address the SITE problem, a novel influence inference framework, “TV Advertising Social Influence Estimation” (ASIE), is proposed based on our analysis of two anti-tobacco campaigns. ASIE divides audience attitudes towards TV ads into three distinct stages: (1) Cognitive, (2) Affective and (3) Conative. Audience online reactions at each of these three stages are depicted by ASIE with specific probabilistic models based on the synergistic influences from both online social friends and offline TV ads. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ASIE.